Threats

An underwear bomber who attempts mass murder on Christmas Day is bound to leave many people upset and a few unhinged. The days since the events aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 have felt like an induced flashback to that dislocating season when the country lost its innocence about the dot-connecting skills of its government. In particular, the tragicomic announcements and rescinding of announcements by the Transportation Security Administration—concerning, for example, when airline passengers might be permitted to read books while in flight—raised the possibility that, more than eight years after September 11th, the United States, like some synthetic organism immune to the laws of evolution, had failed to adapt to the challenges of Al Qaeda.

Compounding this impression, at least on the cable news channels, has been the resurrection—as predictable as the penultimate scene in a slasher movie—of the Cheney World View. Its principal proponent took time off from composing his memoir to issue a statement to Politico that was so lacking in dignity and restraint that it hinted at the presence of a sinister franking machine. On President Obama:

He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. . . . But we are at war.

Apart from its construction on a false premise (“Now let me be clear: we are indeed at war with Al Qaeda and its affiliates,” Obama declared last May; “We are at war,” he said again last week), the statement, and the attention it received, suggested that American discourse on counterterrorism policy remains frozen in 2002. Fortunately, there is abundant evidence that the United States is entering a new era in its struggle against terrorists, one in which government and society are proving to be self-correcting, while Al Qaeda, like Dick Cheney, is proving to be self-isolating.

Flight 253 did expose appalling gaps in America’s terrorism defenses. Some of the “systemic” failures described in documents and statements released last week by the White House, such as the intelligence bureaucracy’s recurrent dot dyslexia, were difficult to evaluate, given the scant detail; they may have been as inevitable as human imperfection. But other breakdowns inventoried defy understanding after so many years and so many dollars: inadequate watch-listing procedures; too few air marshals; and the failure by analysts to properly search databases for biographical insight into Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspected bomber, after he had been reported by his father.

The attempted Christmas attack also put Al Qaeda’s resourcefulness on full display. In its third decade, under severe pressure, it has evolved into a jihadi version of an Internet-enabled direct-marketing corporation structured like Mary Kay, but with martyrdom in place of pink Cadillacs. Al Qaeda shifts shapes and seizes opportunities, characteristics that argue for its longevity. It will be able to wreak havoc periodically for as long as it can recruit suicide bombers and well-educated talent, as it has done consistently.

Yet Al Qaeda is also weakening. Osama bin Laden sought to lead the vanguard of a spreading revolution. Instead, he and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are hunkered down, presumably along the Afghan-Pakistani border, surrounded by only about two hundred hard-core followers. Their adherents in Yemen and Africa number no more than a few thousand. Al Qaeda in Iraq is a tiny fragment of its former self. Bin Laden’s relations with the Taliban seem brittle. Unlike Hezbollah, Al Qaeda provides no social services and thus has built no political movement. Unlike Hamas, its bloody nihilism has attracted no states that are willing to defend its legitimacy. In a world of at least one and a half billion Muslims, this does not a revolution, or even a vanguard, make.

Many of bin Laden’s declared goals, such as the removal of American soldiers from Muslim lands, still resonate in Islamic societies. Yet, in polls conducted across the Muslim world, large majorities repudiate Al Qaeda, and particularly its tactic of murdering civilians. It is common to observe that bin Laden’s poll ratings have collapsed in recent years because his violence has taken the lives of Muslims as well as infidels. Actually, polling shows that citizens of Islamic countries, as elsewhere, overwhelmingly disapprove of any indiscriminate killing, whatever the victims’ religious beliefs, and no matter the cause.

Since September 11th, American public opinion about how to respond to bin Laden’s threats has also evolved. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, the electorate chose nominees in both major parties who opposed torture. Exit polls indicated that one of the reasons voters elected Barack Obama was to improve America’s image abroad.

In office, Obama has begun to reframe counterterrorism strategy. He has crafted a posture of strategic patience, premised upon a forward defense and the durability of American constitutional values. When the White House reorganized the staffs of the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council last year, it created a new “resilience policy” directorate. In May, in a speech on terrorism delivered at the National Archives, Obama remarked:

From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law. That is who we are. And where terrorists offer only the injustice of disorder and destruction, America must demonstrate that our values and institutions are more resilient than a hateful ideology.

The United States is hardly the first democracy to have its nerves jangled and its values challenged by persistent terrorism. The lessons from Britain, India, Israel, Turkey, and elsewhere imply that democracies require time as well as trial and error to find a sustainable balance of politics and policy (as was true of the United States, with respect to Communism, during the Cold War). The examples from abroad suggest that, while the cost of learning about terrorism in a democracy can be very high, it leads in time to strategic postures, backed by public opinion, that are based on national principles similar to those which Obama outlined in May. After the devastating attacks in Mumbai just fourteen months ago, for example, the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, ignored jingoistic cries for military strikes against Pakistan. In response, Indian voters last spring returned him to office and gave his party its best showing in nearly two decades.

Wrestling over how to close Guantánamo and the use of full-body scanners, the American public will once again reconsider the balance of its own counterterrorism policies; so will Obama. Last week, he said that the breakdowns that almost claimed the lives of Flight 253’s passengers were “my responsibility.” He was right; such is his office. Yet the President has neither overestimated nor underestimated terrorism. His record shows that he studies and adapts. May his curriculum always consist of near-misses. ♦

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